This is a pretty restricted idea of what art is and can be. Creating art has been a human impulse probably since the beginning of our species, painting on cave walls, adding flourishes to pottery, tattooing and other body modification. Today you have people writing poetry no one else will read, singing songs no one else will hear, and that's art too.

Obviously art can be propaganda. Batman and Iron Man are capitalist billionaires with hearts of gold. Of course there's a message there. That's only a small sliver of what art is.

I suppose you can crunch some numbers and decide that higher arts funding at the high school level will result in an X% increase in romantic poems exchanged between lovers with a concomitant increase in worker productivity and the general birth rate. Maybe the animal paintings in the Lascaux caves reinforced cultural or religious bonds that improved the local group's success. Looking at things this way is definitely a choice though, and I don't think it's a healthy one generally, though I'm not sure how I could justify that to someone who doesn't already agree. What is the point of being alive other than to care for others and be happy? Making art makes people feel good.